On the Relation between Frequency and Salience in Morphosyntax: The Case of Welsh English

Frequency and salience - (how) do they interact with each other? The central goal of my project is to shed light on the so far rarely investigated role of frequency as an explanatory factor of perceptual salience (resp. non-salience) in dialect grammar. For that purpose, several non-standard grammatical features of spoken Welsh English will be systematically analysed in terms of frequency and salience, in order to be positioned later on in one of the four scenarios: (1) high frequency, high salience, (2) high frequency, low salience, (3) low frequency, high salience and (4) low frequency, low salience. Thereby, I hope to find generalisations for the phenomena in the different categories and answers to questions, such as: are the structures found in scenario (2) perhaps mainly placed in prosodically non-prominent positions in sentences? Furthermore, I am interested in how the factor language change (diachronic variation) affects the frequencies of non-standard items and which role language contact (here: contact with Welsh) plays for the conscious perception of language structures.